Belkin's Review Scams Run Deep: Employee

When Belkin's president Mark Reynoso apologized profusely over the way a Belkin Business Development representative was using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to game the review system at several sites, I asked "how high up did the scandal go?" Apparently, according to a tipster, pretty high up.

According to the tipster, an employee of Belkin, the company had made it "unofficial" policy for all Belkin employees to do whatever is necessary to get good product reviews and good press for products. Given that, it doesn't seem like that Mechanical Turk scandal is all that unusual.

In fact, to summarize employees have written positive reviews or otherwise gamed the system (as reported), written negative reviews of competitors' products, sent products with custom firmware to reviewers to hide bugs, and faked test results.

Also, the employees themselves apparently feel Belkin's products are junk, since, as the tipster says:

our products are such junk, when an internal survey was done, it was found that the majority of Belkin employees purchased competitors products for home use, even with ours being offered free, as they are of such poor quality.

Now, it seems like they just plain went too far this time. Why not just continue to game the system internally rather than trying to hire people through the Mechanical Turk service. That scheme has just exposed the company's machinations to the world.

On the other hand, it has to occur to some of you, as it has to me: what's to prevent any other company from doing the same thing? The answer: there isn't. And realistically, it's probably been happening for a long time.

Full text of the whistleblower's email to Gizmodo is here.